More intense precipitation means more floods. While we can’t say whether a particular flood is due to climate change, modelling indicates that climate change is making such events far more likely and more extreme. The many floods in the past year or two, from Pakistan to the US, might not have broken so many records had the world not been warming.

Although most of the world will get more rainfall on average, dry periods will still occur from time to time. When they do, soils will dry out faster because of the higher temperatures. Once soils dry out, the sun’s heat goes into warming the land rather than evaporating water, triggering or exacerbating heatwaves. This was one of the reasons for the record-breaking heatwave of 2003 in Europe.